Posted on 03/03/2015 10:36:59 AM PST by Starman417
On Thursday the FCC moved to regulate the Internet via what’s commonly called Net Neutrality – although like Obamacare before it was passed, we don’t know everything that’s included in it! Net Neutrality is beyond a doubt the single most despicable thing Barack Obama has done as president. (The FCC is ostensibly an independent agency, but under Obama it’s been anything but.) The big push for Net Neutrality came from Silicon Valley content companies who were whining that ISPs such as Comcast, Time Warner and AT&T were slowing or threatening to slow content that sucked up massive amounts of bandwidth. They are after all the ones who have to invest to expand that bandwidth. These ISPs were at the same time telling companies like Netflix and Google that they could ensure timely delivery of their content if they paid for the extra bandwidth that was being used. The Silicon Valley companies squealed to Barack Obama and he started leaning on the FCC.
Now this should not be viewed as a defense of Comcast or Time Warner. Both are horrible companies when it comes to service and customer service. Terrible! And you might ask how can they survive if they piss off so many customers? Government, of course. In most places they reign as the result monopolies… imposed by government.
This might sound like it’s just about whether you can have House of Cards running simultaneously in three rooms in your house or in every home in your neighborhood. It’s not. It’s about the government seeking to control the Internet, the single most powerful vehicle for the advancement of the human condition in history. That might sound like hyperbole, but it’s not. Today, because of the Internet more people have access to more information, more quickly than at any point since… well, ever. Not only that, they also have access to more products and services, usually at lower cost than any generation ever enjoyed. And perhaps most importantly, they have a vehicle through which they can express their thoughts and share their ideas and highlight oppression & injustice more freely and to more people more quickly than has ever been possible in human history.
A decade from now much of that will be a mere distant memory. Not that the Internet won’t exist, it will. But it will be a government controlled utility rather than the Wild West platform for the free exchange of ideas that it is today. Don’t believe it? Don’t forget, a year ago this same FCC proposed sending “researchers to grill reporters, editors and station owners about how they decide which stories to run.” Six months before that Democrat Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Durbin were debating whether bloggers deserved 1st Amendment protections. And of course this is the administration that used IRS commissioners to stifle the free speech of opponents and the Justice Department to go after reporter James Rosen who just happened to be critical of it.
So now, we have Barack Obama’s FCC telling the country that the government gets to be the arbitrators of what can be said or done on the Internet. Imagine if the government decided that WiFi was a bridge too far when we were all hooked up to the Internet by those static filled phone lines. Imagine if the government put the kibosh on online music sharing when record companies complained about declining CD sales. Imagine if the government supported the status quo when Yahoo was the dominant search provider or MySpace was the dominant social networking site. In what universe would have any of that have been a good thing?
(Excerpt) Read more at floppingaces.net...
Orwell’s “Prolefeed” is in full swing now with O’s desire to reign over everything possible.
Are you sure about that? To me the issue has seemed like cable companies are shaking down Netflix by specifically sabotaging it unless it pays “protection money”. Similar to a hypothetical case of a phone company opening their own pizza delivery service and arranging calls to “mysteriously” drop on their competitors ordering numbers.
That’s awesome!
Karl Denninger has had some very insightful columns on just that, I’ll try to summarize: Netflix has so far been getting a free ride as the first mover in their space. Their very model of needing uninterrupted high bandwidth connections to their customers is not what the net is designed for; under so-called net neutrality they get to go on freeloading, and as more companies offer similar products, the bandwidth demands increase still more and, as it stands, we all get to pay through our ISPs whether we are using Netflix or not. Kind of de facto socialism.
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Hmmm ... I’ll check it out. To be honest I haven’t been following the Netflix issue too much. I got pissed at cable companies during the early days of voice over IP. Skype was the first successful Internet calls company not for the reason that it was better than others, but because it cleverly hid their traffic so cable companies could not sabotage it as they did to other VoIP programs.
Some believe that Netflix staged the so-called sabotage.
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/06/netflix-isp-newdata.html
"Death to America!"
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